IBM® Rational® Build Forge® is IBM's flagship product for build and release management. It not only provides an amazing potential to automate the build process but also to automate the testing procedures for any team.

For most developers, the use of Build Forge has been confined to using the management console, or the graphical user interface (GUI). Many teams are unaware that Build Forge can also be connected through a client and that it can integrate with IBM® Rational® Jazz™ technology-based software, too. When teams need to create or integrate their custom build and test solutions with Build Forge, application programming interfaces (APIs), known as Build Forge clients and provided by Build Forge, play an important role. The client gives you a simple and robust way to add, update, modify, and interact with the Build Forge objects in the same manner that the management console does.

Check out this this demo to learn how to create a basic "Hello World" project in IBM® Rational® Build Forge®. This demo steps you through the following tasks: Creating a server authentication, creating a selector and server, creating a project, running a project, and scheduling a project.

Backup and recovery of systems is extremely important! From an IT perspective, manual backup and recovery processes are tedious, error prone, and time consuming, therefore, they are not frequently implemented. As the volume of data increases, though, it becomes more difficult to back up and recover without longer downtime that impacts production applications. To help resolve these challenges in database backup, recovery, and data unload, IBM DB2 Advanced Recovery Solution for DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows provides three distinct products: IBM DB2 Merge Backup, IBM DB2 Recovery Expert, and IBM InfoSphere Optim High Performance Unload.

Watch how database administrators at a fictitious company improves their backup and recovery strategies with an IBM DB2 advanced recovery solution. See how the team uses various Optim and DB2 tools to make their backup and recovery process faster, simpler, and more efficient. This recovery solution includes three distinct products: DB2 Merge Backup, DB2 Recovery Expert, and Optim High Performance Unload.

New capabilities In Rational Rhapsody, that certainly will help the development community, enable team collaboration; sharing, and reviewing of design artifacts and improve validation of designs early. IBM® Rational® Rhapsody® Design Manager 3.0 leverages Jazz integration to enable teams to share design information on a central location that is accessible from a web client. The new Rational Rhapsody Version 7.6 development environment offers systems engineers improved activity diagram simulation and co-simulation with MathWorks Simulink, which can be used for early validation of functionality. Version 7.6 also includes a user interface with a new look and colors, improved testing support, and usability enhancements.

Check out this demo and see for yourself. The demo provides an overview of Rational Rhapsody Design Manager's capabilities to help teams collaborate, share, review and manage their Rational Rhapsody system engineering or embedded software design information within the overall product lifecycle. It shows how design information can be centrally located and accessed using a web client by the extended team or by a Rational Rhapsody client for system engineers and developers using Rational Rhapsody. A central location enables searching across design and lifecycle information to help locate information faster and assists in keeping the entire team informed of the current status of the design.

The demo also describes how to use Rational Rhapsody Design Manager to conduct design reviews that allow stakeholders to provide comments and visual mark-ups linked to the designs. See how you can trace from designs to other lifecycle artifacts using Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) based linking and visualize relationships between designs and lifecycle artifacts through a dependency relationship diagram.

Based on the Jazz platform, IBM Rational Team Concert provides a lean collaborative lifecycle management solution with agile and formal planning, project reporting, process workflow, work item management, source code management and build management, in a single integrated product supporting all popular platforms. Combine that with IBM® Rational® DOORS® Change Management integration feature and The IBM® Rational® Rhapsody® model-driven development environment creating real-time or embedded systems and software, then you have a full orchestra.

Check out this demo that provides a short introduction on using IBM®Rational® Team Concert for complex systems and software development. It takes you through a scenario that uses several IBM Rational products to show how process controls can be enacted through rule based process guidance. The demo starts in the Rational DOORS requirements database where integration is used with Rational Team Concert to create an implementation request for some work to be performed in an IBM Rational Rhapsody model. It then steps through a work flow using the features of Rational Team Concert to manage both the changes to the model and a formal review process enacted on the project.

It's all part of creating a smarter planet through software development!